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Monday, April 13, 2015

Why we choose to put photos of our kid on the internet

Being a parent is a strange thing. You have to make choices about another human being and hope they do not hate you for it later.

Pictures on the internet is one of them.

Matt and I regularly talk about photos on the internet. We talked about it before Madeleine was born and we have so far stuck to the standards we made then.

With an open blog and instagram and private facebook there is quite a bit of information about our family on the internet. We don't stress over it though and here is our reasoning.

Facebook

1) My facebook has never been hack, which is saying more than my email.

2) All of our family is on facebook. It's really easy to get them photos.

3) It has helped me keep up with friends and connect with them even though we are far away. It's been wonderful for me.

Blog

1) People pay lots of money for their blog to get recognized on the internet. Most of them fail. I have put almost no effort in putting my blog out there and it shows.

2) My blog is pretty boring. Almost all of the hits are from facebook, though I have had one or two post "go viral" on pinterest and facebook (meaning over a 1000 hits) none of them have pictures of our kid. And I haven't gained a single follower from either of those that I know of.

3) When I blog regularly I get about 60 hits per post. When it's erratic, I get about 30.

4) Blogging helps me out personally in so many different ways. It's mainly my way to journal. It also serves as one way we back up photos. Pros way out weigh the cons.

Instagram

This is a new thing for me, but more or less, it's more about my hobbies and life. I follow basic safety precautions when having pictures of Madeleine up.

Matt and I are not naive about the internet. We assume that nothing is secure, including our computers and our emails. We figure unless we only use film cameras and mail out our family photos, creepy people can find a way to get photos of our family. Also, to find out if they were abusing her photos would be next to impossible. If you google her name, we have yet been able to pull a picture of her up on a search engine without directly using our blog's name.

But we also made a very conscience choice to raise Madeleine to believe most of the world is good. And the reason for that is that we really believe it. We believe most people out there are not going to abuse our kid or her photos. We think that the people that are friends with us and connect with us over our family life by far outweigh the bad.

If that every changes, we'll make some changes to how our family works. In the meanwhile, I hope you enjoy getting to know how we are doing. :)

Edit: By the way, if you don't put pictures of your kids up, we don't think you are crazy. We just found that this works the best for us.